SOURCE: "The Way It Was," in History and the Contemporary Novel, Southern Illinois University Press, 1989, pp. 31-75.

Cowart is an American critic and educator who has written extensively on modern literature. In the following excerpt, he provides a detailed discussion of the main themes in Memoirs of Hadrian, analyzing in particular Yourcenar's re-creation of the classical world and ancient "Rome's mental life."

The reader who would know the feel of Roman life in the second century finds in Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian an extraordinary feat of literary, spiritual, and mental archeology. Yourcenar makes the past live through her literary skill and through the exercise of an imagination disciplined by scrupulous scholarship. By focusing the novel on one man's lifelong pursuit of order, liberty, self-knowledge, and the good life, she makes his story a cultural history of politics, society, and thought in ancient Rome. She brings to life a...